“Oh, but we have. She’s in the next building to this.” While Diamond told her about the incident at the window of the Empire Hotel, Una stared like an extra overacting in a silent film. “What we’ve got now,” he summed it up, “is a siege, an armed siege.”
“He’s armed?” she whispered.
“If we want to avert a tragedy, someone must talk him down, and that’s me. But he isn’t interested unless I crack the Britt Strand case. I’m ninety-nine percent sure Mountjoy wasn’t the murderer. It’s down to a handful of suspects, which is why I’m talking to you.”
“You suspect me?”
Under her anxious scrutiny, he answered candidly, “I’ve no reason to, but you’re one of the people I didn’t question four years ago. You may know something nobody else does.”
“Is that why you asked me about G.B.? You suspect him?”
He swirled the dregs of his tea and put the mug to his mouth.
“He’s not violent,” she said, the outraged words tumbling so fast from her lips that they merged and practically lost their sense. “I’ve never known G.B. to attack anyone. Never. Just because he’s big doesn’t mean he’s dangerous. You’re so wrong about this.”
He sat back and passed a hand over his smooth head. “I haven’t made up my mind.”
She said, “G.B. had a thing for Britt. He wouldn’t have harmed her.”
He didn’t spell out the logic that a man in love, even a man with no violent tendencies, might be driven to kill if he learned that his lover was entertaining someone else. “What I’d really like to discover,” he said, “was why Britt Strand went stalking G.B. in the first place.”
“Obviously she was using him to get inside the house.”
“But why? As I said just now, what was so special about you lot?”
“It wasn’t us,” said Una. “It was a previous tenant.”
Intrigued, he waited for her to elaborate.
And she waited, before saying, “Well, you know who lived in Trim Street.”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Jane Austen.”
He frowned. “The writer?” It was a dumb thing to say, but he had been thinking in terms of the twentieth century.
“Well, she did produce four or five of the greatest novels in the English language, yes.”
“Jane Austen once lived in the house you squatted in? Are you sure?” Here it was, apparently, the answer he’d been seeking for days.
“No,” she answered. “I’m not sure, and nobody can be, because the house number isn’t mentioned in the letters. The only certain thing is that she and her mother had to take lodgings in Trim Street after her father died. It was a poor address and they hated it.”
He felt elated. He couldn’t take much credit for rooting out the information, but it was one part of the mystery solved apparently. “How do you know all this?”
“Before I dropped out of Oxford I read Jane Austen. She was the only author I could stomach. I devoured all the novels and the juvenilia and the collected letters. I thought I remembered Trim Street and after we moved in, I went to the Central Library to check. In one letter, before the family even moved to Bath, Jane wrote that her mother would do everything in her power to avoid Trim Street, so you can imagine their feelings when they ended up there, in 1806. It must have been hell. But you can see why it interested Britt Strand.”
He was trying to contain his excitement, and not succeeding. “A Jane Austen house taken over by squatters? Yes, I can. It was the hook to hang her story on.”
Una had obviously reached this conclusion some time ago. “It isn’t known which house in Trim Street the Austen family actually lived in, so Britt could pick on our squat in the certainty that nobody could prove her wrong. It was as likely as any other.”
“Dead right,” he agreed. “You see those photos and you need no persuading. Gracious Georgian fireplaces heaped with beercans. Graffiti. Crusties and their dogs sprawled around. Jane Austen’s home desecrated.”
This was a touch too strong for Una. “Hold on, we didn’t desecrate anything. We used the toilets properly. We didn’t smash windows or start a fire.”
“The point isn’t how you behaved. It’s how the story would have read in the magazine. Jane Austen-”
She cut in savagely. “Bugger Jane Austen. While you sit here talking about some dead writer, Sam is tied up in that hotel with a gun at her head waiting for you to do something.”
He was unmoved. “This isn’t a one-man show. The place is under surveillance. What you’ve just told me is more important than you realize. I needed to know this. Who else have you told.”
“Nobody. Who’s interested, for God’s sake?”
“G.B.? Are you sure you didn’t tell G.B.?”
She shook her head.
“Positive?”
“Why give him unnecessary grief?” she asked.
“Grief? Why should it grieve him?”
“He thought Britt fancied him, poor sap.”
Julie was in their office at Manvers Street when Diamond walked in. “I couldn’t trace you,” she said, and when it sounded like a lame excuse she added more assertively, “Don’t you think you ought to carry a personal radio or a mobile phone?”
If it was meant as a serious suggestion, she could have saved her breath. “Did you follow that woman, Billington’s visitor?” he asked.
“I did.”
“And…?”
“She isn’t his sister.”
“Who is she?”
“Her name is Denise Hathaway and she runs the sub-post office in Iford.”
“Near Bradford-on-Avon?”
“Yes. I followed her home.”
“And spoke to her, I hope?”
“Of course.” Julie paused and changed the tempo of question and answer. “I don’t know if this is good news, or bad. She confirmed Winston Billington’s alibi. On the night of the murder, they both stayed at the Brunei Hotel in Bristol. They’d been lovers for about a year, ever since he chatted her up trying to persuade her to stock his greeting cards in the post office.”
Diamond was frowning. “On the night of the murder, Billington was in Bath.”
“It all fits in, if you’ll let me finish. He was in Bath, as you say. He called at his house to collect his car keys, just as he claimed. Mrs. Hathaway-”
“She’s married, then?”
“Yes. She’s tried to keep this relationship a secret. She has a horror of all her customers in Iford finding out about her infidelity.”
“What about her husband?”
“He works nights at the post office in Bath. She doesn’t seem so worried about him. It’s the neighbors who alarm her. I had no end of a task wheedling out the truth by threats and promises. It’s a real hush-hush affair. She insists that they use separate cars and check in at the hotel at different times. They each book single rooms and he creeps along the corridor to her room when the hotel is quiet.”
“Sounds like a scene from a Victorian novel.”
“This is English village life in 1994, the way Mrs. Hathaway lives it, at any rate. On October the eighteenth, Winston was back from Tenerife and they planned to spend the night together in Bristol. She checked in at the Brunei about eight in the evening and had a meal served in her room. Winston phoned her from Bath to find out the room number and then went to his house and collected his car key, before driving to Bristol. About half-past midnight, he tapped on her door. And he had some flowers with him, from Tenerife.”
“So he bought them for her?”
“Yes.”
